Extended Special Technology area Review on High-Speed Optical Processing.

摘要

Silicon electronic processors are at the heart of all modern DoD systems and each year great strides are made in improving performance. With the VHSIC II program completed, the last concerted effort to increase chip functionality is nearly ended and insertion of this technology into systems is proceeding. As part of this thrust, the development of the next generation high- speed processor was initiated by the DARPA Touchstone program. In this development, optics is seriously considered as the high-speed optical reconfigurable interconnect that will provide microelectronic system architectures with additional processing functionality. Other examples that have capitalized on optics in niche applications are one-dimensional (ID) channelizers, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) post- processors, and optical correlators. To shed further light on the potential of HSOP as a complement to silicon technology, this report summarizes the requirements for five representative systems whose operation is projected to be computationally intensive. The prominent emerging optical devices that have the greatest potential to satisfy these requirements are also presented. The applications are divided into four DoD systems: electronic warfare (EW), electronic intelligence collection (ELINT), automatic target recognition (ATR), and antisubmarine warfare (ASW); and in addition NASA system requirements. These system requirements are important because they tax the limits of today's technology relative to incremental improvements projected into the future. The limitations take various forms; for example, the false- alarm rate for ATR is too high or the throughput rate for a vector processor begins to require parallel combinations of processors as opposed to an increase in the functionality of an existing processor subsystem, etc.